Quicksilver Opens its Doors to Coders

Quicksilver is my hands-down favorite application for OS X. (Seriously, if I were stranded on a desert island, it would be the one thing I brought with me!) However with the exception of becoming Leopard-ized, it hasn’t made many forward strides in recent months. I’d venture a guess that a large reason for that is that Alcor – the brains behind the braun – has taken up a job at Google. Whatever the reason, Quicksilver hasn’t gotten the attention that many of us wish that it would.

Well now, Alcor has released Quicksilver as an open source project under Google Code repository. This is very exciting news as with many more hands in the bucket, we should soon see a boatload of exciting growth out of the launcher-app that is loved by so many.

As if it couldn’t do it all already, there are many things that users in the blacktree forums have been asking for, for some time now. From the standpoint of the base application alone, I would love to see a little more stability out of Quicksilver – though it’s generally been pretty reliable for me. My guess is that as coders are able to get their hands dirty in the code, the number of plugins that will become available will skyrocket. This of course may cause some bloat, but with so many brilliant and creative minds out there, I’m excited to see what the future holds for this incredible application.

So what features are you hoping to see out of a future, open version of Quicksilver? If you’re a coder, I’d love to hear your plans for the newly open source as well.

And if you’re one of those who aren’t familiar with Quicksilver yet, or have tried it now and again but haven’t gotten the point, you may be interested in viewing some of the screencasts we’ve posted here on The Apple Blog in the past. And as a small teaser – and a kick in the pants for me to deliver on something I’ve been promising for a while – look for a Quicksilver Show-off Screencast of the myriad of things it can do in the not too distant future.